Marketing has changed a lot over the recent years. Thanks to technology, marketing is no longer just about creativity. It is also about data and analytics. A robust marketer in our current time needs to be part artist, and part scientist. Take a look at the below infographic from Salesforce that breaks down “The Modern Marketer.”

With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 in Las Vegas this week, some strong numbers are being reported as to the future of technology and marketing in 2019. Take a look at the below for the Total U.S. consumer tech industry retail revenue predicted for 2019.

Prior to starting my career in Marketing, I never drank coffee. I hated the taste of it. Not sure what changed once I started working, but now I cannot kickstart my day until I have made my pit-stop of coffee every morning!

I Love Coffee just posted a great infographic – Which Profession Drinks The Most Coffee. Not surprisingly, Marketing / PR Professional is #2!

I just finished reading another book by Seth Godin. All Marketers are Liars. It was a great book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is trying to sell a product or service.

The book dives into the reality of how marketing works, how marketers have used it to their advantage, and the true value behind being authentic with your marketing.

The reality is this: All marketers tell stories. The stories may or may not be true, BUT those stories impact the consumers buying decisions EVERY DAY. If your story is NOT true, and the truth eventually comes out, it will greatly impact your brand’s reputation. Now, some brand’s false stories will never be proven false, and that is sadly the truth.

This is the power of a story. A story shapes a belief about a brand. With an authentic story, you can literally change the world. A story can also penetrate a worldview, and once that happens, people in that worldview will share your brand with others.

The sad thing is that most brand’s do not think in terms of story. They think in terms of push marketing – how do we drive more interactions with our brands by pushing ourselves on them. Yet, they are unknowingly telling stories along the way, but probably not the stories they want to be telling.

Seth covered a lot in this short book. Grab your copy today and let me know what you think!

Instagram, who is owned by Facebook, is becoming more popular by the day, outpacing other know social sites like Twitter, Vine, and Snapchat.

I am often asked two questions:

1. Should I use Instagram?

Yes, the stats above should easily convince you of the need to be active on Instagram. It is a quickly growing platform with more users signing up and actively using it every single day.

2. Should I use video on Instagram?

The use of pictures and video is the primary reason for the success of Instagram. We live in a visual culture. People want to interact with imagery and video more than they want to read text.

This time is extremely valuable!

Video allows you to provide more detail about your product / service, give some behind the scenes action to build your brand values and allows you the opportunity to connect on a personal level with your audience.

Yes, Instagram videos are short, but that is okay. People’s attention spans on social media are typically pretty short. You can upload a maximum video length of 60 seconds on Instagram – yet you can still do a lot in that 60-second timeframe!

Due to the condensed time, it is even more valuable to adequately consider the strategy behind the video to make the best use of the time and to capture the viewer’s attention out of the gate.

We would love to provide you a FREE evaluation of your current Instagram feed and recommendations for the best use of video in your social strategy with Instagram moving forward. Shoot us an email at hello@sulastudios.com – we would love to help!

– Justin Farrell

Take a look at some samples of the best branded videos on Instagram recently:

As we talked about in our recent blog post, 2017 is right around the corner!

Sure, we still have a couple of months left of 2016, but let’s be honest, those are filled with holiday celebrations, vacations and time with family. Before we all know it, we will be counting down the seconds to the new year!

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, it is still October, but with all of the busy-ness of the remaining months of the year, it is important to start preparing now to kick off the new year with a bang.

January is a great month push your product or service hard, as many people do not properly plan for the holidays and time out of the office. Once they get back in the office in January, it takes a few weeks to ramp up their efforts to promote themselves or their products/services correctly.

If you begin preparing NOW, you can beat out your competition in early January!

What is your plan for the new year? What marketing strategies are you working on to hit January powerfully?

Do you have a new product or service you are rolling out?

Do you have new trainings or vlogs you need to capture?

As you are thinking through your strategies for January, do not forget video! Video is a great tool to help you raise awareness, promote new products/services, automate your systems, and reach prospective customers.

We would love to help you! Shoot us a note at hello@sulastudios.com, and we would love to setup some time in person over coffee/lunch, or over the phone to help you think through your strategies for the first of the year!

Don’t wait – it will be here before you know it. And, by planning now, you can rest peacefully during the holidays, as you know you are already well prepared for January.

There are many platforms available to post your video to, and it can be overwhelming to know which one is the best for your application.

We are here to help.

The quick answer – all of them.

Each of these three platforms, YouTube / Vimeo / Facebook, have benefits over the other platforms, and by posting your video to each of them, you are getting the combined results of all of them working together.

Let’s break them down.

Vimeo.com

Vimeo is a powerful and very professional platform. It is a great avenue to host your videos on, especially if you are sending proofs for others to view, or embedding videos into your website. They have very robust tools to allow easy integration into your current site and allow you the ability to brand / customize the viewing experience for your users.

It has detailed analytics built in to allow you to track information about your viewers.

The downside to Vimeo is that there are additional fees for the professional levels of the software.

YouTube.com

YouTube is currently the second most searched search engine that exists, right behind Google. Interestingly, they are also owned by Google, which means there is a seamless integration of your videos appearing in search results on Google.

Due to the large traffic that YouTube receives, posting your videos to YouTube opens the door for incredible potential, allowing for millions of users to potentially find your videos organically.

YouTube has powerful search algorithms built in, and constantly shows recommended videos next to the current video they are watching. These recommendations are built on previous videos they have viewed and search terms they have entered in the past.

Due to these recommends, the average mobile viewer on YouTube spends 40 minutes watching videos, often because their attention is captured from recommended videos.

With YouTube, it is easily possible for your videos to get thousands of views from people who have never heard of you before, all based off of their searches.

Facebook.com

Facebook is currently the largest social platform that exists, with 1.13 billion active users daily. At the same time, Facebook boasts they receive 8 billion video views on average every day. In recent years, Facebook has put tremendous energy and focus towards videos and has seen video take off among users.

Posting your video to Facebook increases your social reach, and puts it in front of the eyes of your followers on Facebook. Due to the focus on video at Facebook, Facebook places your videos in front of your followers more than photo or text posts. According to Facebook, video posts get an average 135% greater organic reach than posts that contain just a photo.

By posting your videos to each of these platforms, you get the professionalism of Vimeo, the organic traffic from YouTube, and the increased social reach on your Facebook page. Together, you are getting the best impact of your video, which in return boosts your brand visibility and sales.

If you have any questions regarding these platforms, I would love to help. Shoot me an email at justin@sulastudios.com, and I would love to connect and help you through this journey.

Go to Facebook. Right now. Whether on your phone or on your computer. Once it opens, begin scrolling through your feed, and count how long it takes you to encounter a video. Most likely, within 5 seconds, you will scroll over a video. For me, I didn’t even have to scroll. The second item in my feed was a video.

It is incredible the rate at which online video is growing.

Cisco predicts that by 2017, video will make up over 69% of online traffic. According to eMarketer, consumers spent an average of 5.5 hours in front a screen watching video of some sort every day in 2015. Almost 25% of people lives were spent watching video.

According to VentureBeat, Americans watch 8,061 years of video content on YouTube every day.

These numbers are staggering, and they show the speed at which video is gaining momentum and importance in people’s lives. Video has become a powerful tool to capture a prospective client’s attention and provide them necessary information they are looking for. People would much rather watch a 1-minute video that gives them the information they are looking for, than pulling up a 300-word article and reading through it.

Last week, I was doing some work on my car. I began to dive into the project when I realized I had a couple questions regarding the process and how to reach the part I needed to replace. Without hesitancy, I pulled out my phone and did a quick Google search. The first result was a YouTube link of someone that walked me through the process. Watching that video saved me an hour on tinkering around trying to figure it out myself (and most likely breaking something else along the way).

How are you implementing video to tell your story?
How are you answering the questions your customers may have through video form?
How are you providing value to your customers with video?

These are important questions to think through because the use of video is growing and will continue to grow.